I finally have a procrastination explanation: You just never know what you’re going to find when you put a shoven into the dirt.

Sender-inner Robert Koehn , while doing a massive renovation of his back yard, found evidence of a lost civilization.

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I’ll let him tell the tale in his own words, just as he told it to me last May and again recently, just before the Democratic Convention.
“I was walking through my backyard last night and saw a hole in the ground.
The hole was big enough for my hand to fit in it and not touch anything at the other side. It was big enough to swallow a 3-foot piece of rebar. I thought maybe it was a buried treasure. Kinda. I mean, it’s (near) City Park in Denver, what treasure could there be?
“So, I carefully dig around the edges. I find the corners of a 2.5-ft x 2.5-ft piece of stone.”
But as Koehn dug deeper, it wasn’t just a stone. It was a stone-lined hole in the ground.
Rob’s theory: “It was some sort of waste management system from 100 years ago.” But his discoveries just kept coming, especially when he took a few weeks off from his job as Macintosh skills instructor to spend some more quality landscaping time.
“More recently, we’ve found massive concrete supports for what was once a porch. Um, the ‘porch’

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was touching the ground! These things were bigger than the ones we filled for my dad, and his porch was 6 feet off the ground. Then again, Dad sold his house and I don’t know if that porch is still upright. Now we’re in the process of digging where the paver-covered patio will go.” Among the things he’s found while digging for that part of his new back yard: an ivory-handled 12-inch knife/machete.

Noy and Rick Farrell from Taste of Thailand in Englewood write in to say they’re having a blast preparing their restaurant’s dishes from fall veggies that are overlapping a late peach harvest. They’re playing with lemongrass, basil, chard, squashes and pumpkins — but alas, they, like many of us, suffered from Total Tomato Denial Syndrome when the weather turned too hot for fruit to set back in July. They’re hoping to still get a good late harvest.

I’ll cross my fingers along with Noy and Rick — I’ve got fruit on almost all of my tomato plants, even the persnickety yellow brandywine. And I just picked a Black Pearl tomato. But for a couple of weeks, I’ve been depending on the farmer’s markets up here in Larimer County for supplies for my annual Can-a-palooza. I’ve done eight pints of salsa — and counting. I’m getting a feeling that I’d better have a few recipes for green tomato pickles up my sleeve.